Down for the Count...

The Count would fly in from NYC for a week at a time and stay on East Coast Time. We'd work after nightfall in his suites, always in the best Parisian hotels, and around one or two AM, he'd call down for the limo, and we'd go eat fashionably overdesigned dinners in restaurants you couldn't see from the street, filled with cokefiend-thin models and older men in pitchblack shades and pimp threads. After intricate desserts, I'd ride the limo back to suburbia while the Count worked deeper into the night. Over the next six months, I watched the Count mesmerize CEOs, politicians and accountants with his aura of old New York investement banker money, stratospheric name dropping and a nitroglycerine temper that toed the line into contempt but somehow always stayed just this side of simple impatience for the opportunities awasting. They promised him millions, they offered to work for free, they went on national television to pledge their eternal souls to him and his vision. He, in turn, promised them incredible earning ratios, on-the-ground-floor investment opportunities, solutions to societal issues costing billions upon billions and more importantly, votes. All based on the spreadsheets I made for him in the deep of the night. He promised me shares of the company, four times my current salary, a green card, a corner office in Manhattan, the kingdoms of the earth. It all came crashing down eventually, and the Count has moved on to the next great con, still living in style waiting for the Big One, the break into billionairehood. We stood in his unpaid suite, window open upon the Place de la Concorde slick with rain and empty of any traffic, before he flapped his cape to fly back into the night.

The Count...

I could have flown out that window with him, become like him, living in a parallel world of power, money, lies and solitude, and started my own search for someone to bring to the Dark Side... but he left empty-handed, bloated with misery and without the true sustenance of any vampire : their victim's desire to be like them, that reflection in the other's eyes that mirrors refuse them. Because they can't stand the sight of themselves.